Matthew Somerville
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dracos.co.uk
Matthew Somerville
@dracos.co.uk
2.1K followers 98 following 1.2K posts
I help people report broken street lights, find out their bin day, plan train travel, manage an orchestra, locate the nearest postbox, research old theatre productions, keep time in a choir, and occasionally play board games | https://dracos.co.uk
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dracos.co.uk
Always nice to see Gorton Monastery in the eastern distance rising above the houses as the train approaches Manchester
Gorton Monastery, I couldn’t find a good photo taken from the train sticking up in the air
November 11, 2025 at 9:43 AM
dracos.co.uk
If you select “Least walking” in Google Maps, it changes to first suggest you… walk the whole way instead
Google maps public transport, saying walk 9 minutes, catch a bus, then walk some more for 19 minutes Least walking is ticked, it suggests walking for 49 minutes first
November 2, 2025 at 10:49 AM
dracos.co.uk
“Huntingdon, near Cambridgeshire“, @theguardian.com? Huntingdon is in Cambridgeshire, Cambridgeshire isn’t a spot, you’ve got a pin on Needingworth, a little village, also in Cambridgeshire
“A map showing Huntingdon, near Cambridgeshire.” With pins in Huntingdon, Kings Cross, and a pin saying Cambridgeshire a little to the east of Huntingdon
November 2, 2025 at 6:54 AM
dracos.co.uk
In love with this chord progression, – Ic, then vii°7 and I in the relative minor. Probably more famous uses, but works so well here
A snippet from Rachmaninoff’s eleventh of his thirteen preludes (opus 32)
October 26, 2025 at 1:19 PM
dracos.co.uk
South Birmingham Sinfonia playday today, doing both Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome (and me filling in sight reading on piano in one movement). Smell of Crunchie from the factory on the way, and some flash flooding
The Bournville Cadbury factory Flash flooding on Linden Road by the bridge
October 25, 2025 at 12:38 PM
dracos.co.uk
Did the AI write this paragraph
“The landmark plan, secured through OpenAl's ongoing partnership with the Ministry of Justice, will see the company enable its business customers to store their data on British soil for the first time British businesses will be able to host data on secure, sovereign servers not only enhances privacy and accountability but reinforces national resilience in the face of growing global cyber threats.”
October 24, 2025 at 12:37 PM
dracos.co.uk
Agreeing with all this, but not the slight at Zork which handled both take and pick fine ;) if50.substack.com/p/1977-zork is a great look back.

I love GUIs, I love CLI too; brilliant for processing, chaining things together, can be much faster than GUI. The problem is this browser isn’t doing that.
A screenshot of playing Zork: > take the leaflet Taken. > drop the leaflet Dropped. > pick up the leaflet Taken. "Zork’s parser represented another improvement over Adventure. While the earlier game could only understand inputs of two words at a time—a verb and a noun—Zork added support for multi-word verbs and nouns like look under or trap door, as well as the concept of both a direct and indirect object, enabling commands that simply hadn’t previously been possible such as attack troll with sword or put jewels in sack. As time went on, the team added pronouns, articles, and the ability to chain multiple commands together or refer to groups of objects more selectively, eventually touting that their parser could understand a command as complex as put all of the valuables except the torch and the coin into the trophy case. While inputs this long were rare in practice, the new parser’s smarts lent it a certain mystique it would never entirely shed, making Zork’s possibility space seem even more unbounded. “I’m not sure it can be solved,” wrote one overwhelmed reviewer: “there is so much in it and the possibilities seem staggering.” Zork’s creators had written about how their program could “simulate enough of the universe to appear to be more intelligent than it really is,” and a parser whose capabilities were less easy to understand was a key part of that illusion of intelligence."
October 23, 2025 at 12:16 PM
dracos.co.uk
That is indeed the lists I have on Bluesky :)
My lists on Bluesky, showing them be the list from Borges
October 22, 2025 at 11:21 AM
dracos.co.uk
Aww, LambdaMOO is also still running
A telnet session to LambdaMOO, showing some introductory text A text map of part of LambdaHouse
October 15, 2025 at 8:21 PM
dracos.co.uk
Very interesting report (they don’t actually link to it from the press release, it’s at www.ippr.org/articles/the...)
I’ve thankfully never needed a car in Birmingham, would be great for that to apply to more people
A graph showing share of expenditure and weekly expenditure across income quintiles by whether the household owns a vehicle or not. Share hovers round 16-18% for household with vehicle, 2-6% for no vehicle; amount goes from £80 to £150 for amount from low to high income quintiles with a vehicle, £10-20 without.
October 12, 2025 at 8:19 AM
dracos.co.uk
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
The “But It Might Work For Us” meme, changed to be as follows: Panel 1: A man says, “There are many parts of AI that I think are kind of bubbly right now.” Panel 2: A woman says, “Well did it work for those people?” Panel 3: The man replies, “No, it never does, I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but...” Panel 4: He continues, “...but there’s something real happening here.” The words in the first and last panel are taken from the BBC News article.
October 11, 2025 at 12:54 PM
dracos.co.uk
If you want a much more positive story, we took ours at 4 months to the Isle of Wight on holiday on the train and boat :)
October 7, 2025 at 7:23 PM
dracos.co.uk
Moon over Cadbury
The Cadbury factory from across the cricket ground, with the moon and some wispy clouds above
October 6, 2025 at 6:27 PM
dracos.co.uk
I am reminded of the graphs I made some months ago:
bsky.app/profile/drac...
A graph showing Kent’s net outgoings (not including central grants) over the past 9 years, and the percentage that has been spent on adult social care, children, growth/environment/transport, strategic/corporate and financing. A majority of the budget is spent on adult social care and children, rising from 63% of £933m in 2017-18 to 72% of £1,531m in 2025-26. A graph showing gross expenditure of Kent by directorate, 2018 to present day. Adult social care and children take up over three quarters of the expenditure now, as opposed to two thirds back in 2018-19
October 5, 2025 at 10:48 PM
dracos.co.uk
There are weekly, if not daily, criminal offences occurring at every pelican and zebra crossing I use around me, more dangerous (and indeed, occasionally terrifying) than holding a placard, and yet I never see a police presence at any of them
"Mahmood rejects suggestion police should just ignore people holding placards saying they support Palestine Action Mahmood says she has “no truck” with the argument that people should not be arrested for holding up signs saying they support Palestine Action (a proscribed group – which means just holding a sign in public saying you support them is an offence). She says: "I have no truck with this argument that suggests that merely holding up a placard somewhere in central London somehow shouldn’t have a police response. If you’re supporting a proscribed organisation, you are breaking the law of our land. That organisation has been prescribed. It is an offence to show support for that organisation. People might not like that decision. They might have questions about the way that the anti-terror laws work in this country. But there is no excuse for holding up placards supporting a banned organisation. That will always be met with a police response.""
October 5, 2025 at 9:05 AM
dracos.co.uk
Made this map of the previous years’ catchment areas for various secondary schools in South Birmingham
A map of South Birmingham showing the catchment circles for last year for a variety of secondary schools
October 4, 2025 at 12:11 PM
dracos.co.uk
Should have replaced that top left corner window with intunemixtapefanclub.dracos.co.uk/on-now/ for the screenshot!
Screenshot of my In Tune Mixtape Fan Club site showing it is currently playing the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony
September 27, 2025 at 12:57 PM
dracos.co.uk
Listening to Beethoven, while watching a train on the anniversary of the Stockton to Darlington journey now on its way to Stockton instead of Darlington
Screenshot of my laptop with four windows tiled – this window top left, traintimes.org.uk top right; map of the railway network bottom left; opentraintimes.com signal map bottom right
September 27, 2025 at 12:56 PM
dracos.co.uk
It’s train 1E13.
@elizabethalker.bsky.social currently waiting at Darlington, but it looks like the train is going to skip it and go straight through to York on the bypass
Live train signal map near Hartlepool
September 27, 2025 at 12:46 PM
dracos.co.uk
One of these mythical creatures is not as mythical as the others, unless I’m seeing a lot of mythical creatures from the train window
A bunny mermaid squishee, in a collection of “Dragon/ Unicorn/ Bunny/ Werewolf” A unicorn squishee, in a collection of “Dragon/ Unicorn/ Bunny/ Werewolf”
September 27, 2025 at 9:02 AM
dracos.co.uk
I do like the little threaded deploy bot wot I made
Screenshot of a Slack channel showing some deploys of sites this morning (staging sites redacted); each deploy kicked off is a message, and each server deploy leaves a reply in the message’s thread
September 26, 2025 at 10:11 AM
dracos.co.uk
Lego website not letting you click through pictures, read reviews, big white gaps and spinners? Oh, because their main JavaScript file is returning a 404, right. But it works if you come from a list page rather than direct, but of course
Error message on lego.com in the dev console, saying: "Refused to execute script from 'https://www.lego.com/_next/static/chunks/73.a4e655720960a7b8.js' because its MIME type ('text/html') is not executable, and strict MIME type checking is enabled." Lego website screenshot with big white gap and big grey gap where some interactive content should be
September 21, 2025 at 9:01 PM
dracos.co.uk
So that worked, woo; and then finally got around to adding aspect ratio support to Polybot (PR github.com/russss/polyb... cc @russ.garrett.co.uk :) ) so that posts will now go from this: to this:
A bluesky post for an upcoming Sarah & Duck episode posted by my bot, with big light grey bars above and below the embedded picture from the episode A bluesky post for an upcoming Sarah & Duck episode posted by my bot, without big light grey bars above and below the embedded picture from the episode
September 21, 2025 at 8:31 PM
dracos.co.uk
I do not recommend using Google Maps for walking round Matlock
Google Maps, near Bentley Brook in Matlock, the dot is in the middle of an empty green space with no paths marked OpenStreetMap, near Bentley Brook in Matlock, where the arrow is on a path and all the other paths are there too
September 21, 2025 at 12:09 PM
dracos.co.uk
Implies it will not open this year, as previously said at archive.is/jWzBw
“Construction work is scheduled to finish at the end of 2025 [...] after which West Midlands Trains can start training”
Found this picture at www.skyscrapercity.com/threads/mose...
Been waiting 20 years, can wait a bit more!
Timeline of Camp Hill Line construction, showing some steps completed and some missed, aiming to finish Autumn 2025
September 21, 2025 at 8:41 AM